Many of the recent events in our world have laid a foundation of fear that has gripped many of us. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains how these events have sparked a surprising shift in views about objective morality, prompting people to ask the question, do I know God?
How do we answer that question? Our study today begins in the book of Micah, and it's titled What God Requires. We're going to read from the Old Testament in the book of Micah and chapter 6, and if you are able to turn to it in your Bible, wherever you are, let me encourage you to do that. Micah chapter 6 and reading from verse 1.
Hear what the LORD says. Arise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice. Hear, you mountains, the indictment of the LORD, and you, enduring foundations of the earth. For the LORD has an indictment against his people, and he will contend with Israel. O my people, what have I done to you? How have I wearied you?
Answer me. For I brought you up from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery, and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. O my people, remember what Balak king of Moab devised and what Balaam the son of Beer answered him, and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal, that you may know the righteous acts of the LORD. With what shall I come before the LORD and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?
Amen. Well, if we have a text for this morning, and I suppose we do, it would be the eighth verse of the passage that we read. He has told you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? I should say that I'm going to take quite a while to get there. I hope I won't frustrate you along the journey.
But let me begin in this way by asking a question. Do orchestras really need conductors? Franz Welser-Mast would surely answer yes to that question. But after all, he is the conductor of the Cleveland Symphony. And I would imagine, although I haven't checked, that along with him, all the members of that orchestra would agree. If the conductor were to be deposed by them in some kind of coup and the members decided that what they were going to do was simply go with their feelings—play whatever they felt at any particular time and whatever volume they chose and so on—well, of course, clearly the end product would be chaotic and would be unappealing. All of the harmony that was potentially there in submitting to the orchestra score and in bowing under the baton and the BDI of the conductor would, of course, have been forfeited.
Now let me ask a second question. How are we to account for the absence of harmony in our world? And one way of answering that—and it is the Bible way of answering that—is to acknowledge that we have deposed the conductor, that the Bible tells us we have been created by God and for God, and yet we have been separated from God, and we have been scattered in the imagination of our hearts. And so that is why you find people saying—and you may say this yourself—"Well, who needs a score? We can make the plays up as we go along.
We can just play whatever tune we like. Whatever it is to me is what is important, and what it means to somebody else will just have to find its place." And furthermore, people might say the idea of a conductor, the idea of one who oversees us and so on, is just so far away from all that we now hold to and affirm.
Now, in this, you may not agree, and you may find that the metaphor is far too clichéd for you. But there are few people that I meet at the moment who would be prepared to deny the fact that our world is out of kilter. It is, as our friend Melanie Phillips suggests, a world turned upside down. It is a world that is not only fractured, but it is fearful. It's a fearful place inhabited by people who are themselves increasingly filled with fear. And that fear has a basis. There is a foundation for the fearfulness.
And we're dealing, actually, at the moment, it would seem, with a three-headed monster. We're dealing with it pandemically. Our lives have been completely changed as a result of this virus, which has swept the world. And every morning that we awake, there are new statistics, there are conflicting solutions, varied attempts to restrain the virus, the constant and obvious search for a vaccine, and in the middle of all of that, the novel and somewhat dreadful experience of being continually isolated from one another, and not least of all in the experience of illness and in the sadness of death.
Who would ever have planned for a virtual funeral? Not only pandemically but also economically. It's not for me to give any kind of instruction in this regard. I, like you, just simply read what I find day to day. But it would seem obvious that we have been confronted now by levels of unemployment, by mountains of debt, that we are told will take more than time to relieve or to repay. And then, racially. Pandemically, economically, and racially. Our nation now has been fractured, and its brokenness has been highlighted in the demonstrations that have come in the aftermath of the unspeakably brutal and cruel death of George Floyd. And again, fear grips the nation.
Which is the worst of the viruses, we would find ourselves saying? That which threatens us pandemically or economically or racially? What is the antidote to racial prejudice?
It's almost impossible to come to Micah chapter 6 and verse 8 without, certainly in these days, saying something along these lines. Two observations. One, I've chosen to use the more old-fashioned term racial prejudice, or racial discrimination. And the reason for that is because language is now so abused. For example, a term like fascist, which has a real meaning and a real origin, is used at all kinds of times and in different ways and with different people, or Nazi in the same way, and also now the word racist.
The word racist has now been so abused that it has virtually lost its meaning. So I say, the issue we deal with is racial prejudice. It's just one observation. The second observation is this—that with the events of the last few days, objective morality has now made a reappearance.
What do I mean by that? Well, matters now are immediately identified as being either right or wrong. So right and wrong is now back on the agenda. Which is quite surprising, because Western culture, certainly over the last fifty years, has increasingly come to regard ethics as a matter of personal taste. After all, with no conductor, we can play what any tune we want, with the only caveat being as long as it doesn't bother anybody else.
But even that doesn't play much of a part. As I drove here this morning, one of the signs read, Racism is Wrong. Which, of course, it is. However you want to define it, we know what we're talking about today. But the thought that occurred to me was, isn't it interesting that it doesn't say something like, Racism is a bad idea? Or, my personal view is that it is this?
No. It simply says, It is wrong. Because every honest person knows that it is wrong. And from a biblical perspective, clearly so. Because when we turn to the Bible, we realize that the Bible says there is only one God. And there is only one reality, which is that man has been made—men and women—made in the image of divinity, in the image of God. And as a result of that, there is only one morality, and that that morality emerges from God himself. Therefore, God is a God who says, I'll tell you what's right, and I'll tell you what is wrong. Now, people react to that today, but they've reacted to it in every day. Listen to how Paul gave an address along these lines when he was asked to speak to a group of people in Athens. And this is how he began.
I've shortened it in order that the impact may help us. This is Paul speaking to the gathered group. He says to them, God, who made the world and everything in it, made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.
But now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day when he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. Now, in light of that, it is impossible to say, Nothing matters. What Paul is affirming is what the Bible declares—that we do not live in a random universe, we are not here by chance, we are not sustaining ourselves by our own endeavors, we were intricately put together in our mother's womb, and all the days of our lives have been written in his book before one of them came to be. To say, Nothing matters is ridiculous. It all matters. It matters far more than we know, because it matters to the Creator, it matters to the lawgiver, and for this reason black lives matter. It is impossible to be otherwise.
In fact—and this we will not delve into this morning—these issues of such brutality and murder matter far more than our culture is prepared to accept. The sanctity of human life—the sanctity of human life—is bound up in the fact that man was made in the image of God, that he is not a random collection of molecules held in suspension. He is not the product of time plus matter plus chance. He was put together purposefully.
His genetic code was written by the Creator himself. And that is why the Bible says that if you take a man's life, you forfeit your own life. And the recognition of the sanctity of life is revealed not only in the way we care for those in the fragile elements of life but in the way that we are prepared to acknowledge that capital punishment for such murder is not only legitimate, it is divinely ordained. You think we care about life? We don't care about life enough. God cares. God made us.
God loves those who have been so tragically bereaved. And our great need, as we have been reminding ourselves through these days of COVID chaos, our great need in all of these discussions is to have a solid dose of theological realism. All of us have emotional attachments. All of us have backgrounds that are unique to ourselves and so on. But the real question is, are we going to gain an understanding of things by looking to the Scriptures themselves?
My opinion is as valid as the next person's opinion, perhaps, if it's true, if it's good. But by and large, we all are in need of being taught by the one who knows the answers to all the questions. And that is essentially the role of the prophet. And the minor prophets—Micah is one of the minor prophets. That doesn't mean that, you know, you have, like, grade-A prophets and then grade-B prophets and that he's basically a B.
It just has to do with the amount of the material. He just has seven chapters. Isaiah has a ton of chapters. So he would be majored in terms of length and Micah and the others.
In fact, there were twelve of them all together in a scroll for a long while. What is Micah the prophet saying? What is he providing for the people?
Well, he's not talking about his own ideas. Look at how the chapter begins. Hear what the Lord says. This is the role of the prophet. This is the role of the preacher of the Bible. Not for me or for anybody else to stand up and give you our views, but to stand up and say, Listen. Listen now. Listen to God.
And that's why we constantly say, You are sensible people. Examine the Scriptures to see if these things are so. Notice that he is speaking to his people. It is God here who is speaking, and he is speaking to his people. And he has reason to contend with them, to indict them. And the reason for that is because, if you work your way back through the text, you will see that they have been devising wickedness, they have been working evil on their beds, they can't wait to get up in the morning to perform it, and it is in the power of their hand to do. That's the beginning of chapter 2.
And so it goes on. And so he is addressing them, and he is addressing them with reason for contention. Also, you will notice that in addressing them, his tone is one of entreaty. Twice in verses 3–5, you have the opening phrase, O my people! O my people! That sense of tenderness. Oh! It's a bit like, Oh, come on!
O my people! Now, what he then does is he reminds them of his righteous acts. You will see that down in verse 5. The righteous acts of the Lord. Now, he's just giving them, essentially, a little reminder of history—the redemption that he has brought about in verse 4, in bringing them safely out of Egypt. The leadership that he then gave to them so that they might make progress in Moses and Aaron and Miriam. The way in which, in the events of Balak and Balaam, God in his great providence turned curses to blessing. And in the encounter from Shiddon to Golgal, he's simply reminding them of the events that were there when they crossed the Jordan.
You remember, if you recall that story, how it was in full spade—not a good time to try and cross a river. And yet when the priests put their feet in the water, the waters were held back, and the people walked through on dry ground, as another reminder to them of the God of the Exodus was the God who was looking after them. These, he says, are the righteous acts of the Lord. And notice that you may know the righteous rights of the Lord.
It doesn't mean that you might be able to rehearse them. No, the knowledge that he's speaking about here is a life-transforming knowledge—that you might know the righteous acts of the Lord, that when you think about what God has done for you, it might be transformative. Knowledge of the truth of God is the basis, then, for making sure that our emotions and our feelings are both given full effect and at the same time held in check. And so he says, I want you to know the righteous acts of God.
I don't want you just to be able to say, This is what happened, and this is what happened, and so on. No. That you may know. That's the real question.
Do you know God? His people had completely lost sight of all that God had done for them. That's why he says to them, What have I done to you? How have I wearied you?
Answer me! It had all become tedious. It had become tiresome. They were saying, Oh, it's the same old material. It was routine.
It became irrelevant. It was dangerous. As we understand the righteous acts of God, we find sustained comfort in a broken world. That's part one of today's message, titled What God Requires, on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. When something's broken, we want it to be restored, and Alistair is with us today to share briefly about the one who can bring restoration to our lives, and he explains why that message is essential here at Truth for Life. As you listen to this message, perhaps it has become even clearer to you that our world is fractured and in desperate need of a Savior.
The Bible makes it clear that we don't live in a random universe, that we've been purposefully created by God, that he sustains our lives, that he holds authority over us, and that one day he will judge us. For that reason, our need of the hour is always that we might know the Gospel, the truth that is conveyed in the Bible, that in Jesus we have a Savior, Lord, and Friend, that his invitation is to come to him, to believe in him, to rest entirely upon him. And it's proclaiming that message that Truth for Life is all about. Every day on the program, we've been opening the Bible, hearing God's Word, learning what it means to know him, love him, and serve him. By God's grace and your financial partnership, we want to continue boldly into 2021. Please contact us before tonight's midnight deadline with a needed donation. Every gift matters, and your giving will go directly to the distribution of this program and to the worldwide proclamation of the Gospel. Thank you.
Thank you, Alistair. Your giving allows us to boldly enter into 2021 proclaiming the message of the Gospel on Truth for Life. To make sure that your gift reaches us before the midnight deadline tonight, you can donate right now online at truthforlife.org slash donate, or you can donate by calling 888-588-7884. When you do, we want to invite you to request a book that will set a positive tone for your family worship time in 2021. The book is titled Exploring the Bible Together. This is an incredibly helpful book for parents who are busy because it lays out a plan that is easy to manage. You read about five verses a day, and as you do, your family will read verses beginning in Genesis all the way to Revelation at the end of the year, and each daily entry in the book Exploring the Bible Together combines scripture reading, discussion questions, there's a key spiritual lesson to take away, and a closing prayer.
It provides everything you need to be able to lead a devotional time that your kids will look forward to and that will strengthen your own faith. This is also a great book for grandparents or those involved in children's ministry because it helps children view scripture as a treasure that is waiting to be uncovered. This is the last day this book is being offered, so be sure to request your copy when you give today.
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I'm Bob Lapeen. Thanks for joining us here on New Year's Eve. We hope you will be with us on New Year's Day tomorrow as we begin 2021 with part two of our message titled, What God Requires. We'll learn how to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly by relying on Jesus for strength. It's a timely message to begin the new year. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
